Dabbling
Plastic climbing is hard: all those long reaches, wild swings and slippery slopers. No matter how hard I try, I never seem to get any better. But wait; how hard do I actually try? Do I really think I can spend most of my free time hanging from ice tools, then put in a few gym sessions and expect to float up C5 problems on the sculpted plywood of the Calgary Climbing Centre? No, given that kind of training regimen - or rather the absence of one - I should be happy I can grunt my way up the occasional C4. You don't get shit done by dabbling. Success takes discipline and focus. In my defence, I don't always dabble. Last summer in Pakistan Ian and I were determined to finally climb something big. After a couple of trips on which we'd puked, gasped and exhausted ourselves into failure, we thought we knew what it took to succeed: staying healthy while surrounded by Asian microbes, acclimatizing on boring snow slogs and pacing ourselves on big pushes. And it worked. When a gi...